We all have been in situations where you have plenty of time to kill on the plane and wish you could utilize that time to catch up on your FT reading. I have been toying with WebReaper to see if it's feasible to grab the first 20-30 threads of the 8-10 forums I subscribe to - and of course the result has been mixed. (i.e. some pages did not load properly, you don't get graphics, etc etc).

Has anyone done the same with other software or has anyone successfully cached your subscribe forums to-go? Granted I don't expect to be able to post/respond - I just need to read and be a good audience.

Thanks in advance!
Jamester

I've tried (past tense) grabbing these pages for offline reading on an older Palm (older=lower resolution that the current models), using either AvantGo or Plucker (both are freeware).

Had OK results, biggest drawback was these forum pages are too wide, constantly had to scroll left and right to read anything. After a while, stopped doing it, I really just tried it to see if I could do it. If there's a fix to the horizontal scrolling issue, I do it again.

I'm not the tech guy, but i thought we have engaged an RSS-feed for FlyerTalk which might work for this situation? Anyone know more about this type of application and how we can tweek it for members use?

I never thought of RSS as an offline application (probably because my reader doesn't autodownload the content, just the header information). That's a great idea, and I'll need to upgrade to another reader.

The flyertalk feed address, by the way, is

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/external.php?type=rss

Have you considered using offline webpages??

It's pretty simple... from IE Help:

When you make a Web page available offline, you can read its content when your computer is not connected to the Internet. For example, you can view Web pages on your laptop computer when you don't have a network or Internet connection. Or you can read Web pages at home without tying up a phone line.

You can specify how much content you want available, such as just a page, or a page and all its links, and choose how you want to update that content on your computer.

If you just want to view a Web page offline, and you don't need to update the content, you can save the page on your computer. There are several ways you can save the Web page, from just saving the text to saving all of the images and text needed to display that page as it appears on the Web.

and...

To make an existing favorite item available offline

On the Favorites menu, click Organize Favorites.
Click the page you want to make available offline.
Select the Make available offline check box.
To specify a schedule for updating that page, and how much content to download, click Properties.
Notes

Before you go offline, make sure you have the latest version of your pages by clicking the Tools menu and then clicking Synchronize.

And actually, when in the 'Organize Favorites' box, it's easier to just right-click a fav and then select 'Make available offline...' which gives a setup wizard.

Have fun! ^

I used to do this when I was flying a lot and before I became self-absorbed.

Well then, I'm sure that you will enjoy this link.

Can you recommend and RSS reader that would let you do this? It sounds like a great idea.

IMHO moving your email client to Thunderbird and using that as email client is the best option.

Firefox also has the capability of RSS-fed bookmarks, but I have never used it. The real benefit of RSS is to have auto-feeds of changed material that you can then access online. That's not what the OP was looking for.

Thanks. I use Firefox and have some RSS feeds on my Yahoo home page for instance. I understand the question was about offline access. I got the impression from cordelli's post that there were specific RSS readers that would let you automatically download RSS feeds for later offline access. Perhaps I interpreted his post incorrectly. The RSS thing is a bit new to me.

ScottC, are you saying that Thunderbird will let me do this?

Thanks for any more info.

I haven't had time to search one out yet, I didn't realize that there are so many out there. I'm assuming one of them has to have an autodoanload feature on it, so as soon as there are a few minutes....

Thanks for the recommendation. It's now in my shopping cart!

To update my earlier post:
RSS is excellent for realtime feeds and links to such. RSS is also good at the auto-update/download feature when a site changes content you are monitoring. There are a gazillion free and pay-for RSS readers.

And, if you use Outlook a lot, NewsGator and IntravNews are 2 plug-ins that install on top of Outlook and provide RSS feeds, with full content, right into Outlook folders for reading anytime. You have typical preview content by feed, and full read capabilities -- each site's RSS feed is like a new email. You thus avoid having to maintain and use yet another application.

You can try out both for free. I found NewsGator's grouping by topic functions lacking. I have not tried IntravNews yet but it is getting a lot of good press.

Yeps

Thunderbird lets you add RSS feeds just as easy as adding a mail folder.

I've been using Outlook for many years, and in one week Thunderbird proved that Outlook is a total POS, I'm lovin it!